Considering environmental costs in energy planning

This paper provides a brief overview of the developing role of environmental costing in electric resource selection. While unlikely to create overnight changes in the way resources are selected, the consideration of these costs will likely continue to grow in importance, creating new opportunities for emerging technologies and new challenges for utility and regulatory decision-makers. As the definition of cost-effectiveness is broadened by environmental coat analysis, the menu of technologies will likewise be broadened. Increasingly, the question of environmental characteristics will be shadowed by issues of finance, operation, and dispatchability. This paper evaluates solar thermal first on social cost basis, and then evaluates it in terms of operational characteristics to describe the cost, environmental, operational, and other characteristics that make solar thermal a particularly attractive technology in the emerging utility environment